This application claims the benefit of Korean Patent Application No. 2001-79497, filed Dec. 14, 2001, in the Korean Industrial Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated hereby by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a carriage aligning apparatus for an ink-jet printer and a method thereof, and more particularly, to a carriage aligning apparatus for and method of aligning a carriage with respect to a paper transferring direction in an ink-jet printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, an ink-jet printer has a guide bar disposed across a paper transferring direction on a main frame. A carriage is disposed at the guide bar to slide along the guide bar. The carriage has an ink cartridge and an ink nozzle array ejecting ink of the ink cartridge on the transferring paper. The ink nozzle array has a head gap with the transferring paper passing below the ink nozzle array, and is moved with the carriage to a lengthwise direction of the guide bar. In other words, the lengthwise direction is supposed to be perpendicular to the paper transferring direction.
However, as shown in FIG. 1, in the ink-jet printer having the above structure, an image is irregularly printed since a reference center line L of the ink nozzle array 2 moving along the guide bar 1 and the paper transferring direction A of paper 3 are not at the right angles. In other words, the ink should be ejected as the ink nozzle array 2 is moved along the reference center line L in a state that the ink nozzle array 2 is level with a widthwise direction B of the paper perpendicular to the transferring direction A. Yet, since practically various errors are generated between the guide bar 1 and the carriage 5, there exists a problem like the above-mentioned deviation between the reference center line L and the widthwise direction B.
As described above, when the reference center line L and the widthwise direction B are not level with each other, each line of the printed image is not level with each other as well.
The present invention has been made to overcome the above and other problems of the related art. Accordingly, it is the object of the present invention to provide a carriage aligning apparatus for an ink-jet printer having an improved structure for and a method of adjusting the alignment of printing paper and an ink nozzle array of the carriage.
Additional objects and advantageous of the invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows and, in part, will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention.
The above and other objects may be achieved by providing carriage aligning apparatus for the ink-jet printer according to an embodiment of the present invention. The carriage aligning apparatus includes a spherical bearing rotatably connected to a carriage moving along the guide bar, a shaft hole formed eccentrically with respect to a center of an outer circumference of the spherical bearing to receive the guide bar, and a position deciding member maintaining a position of the spherical bearing with respect to the carriage and aligning the carriage with regard to the guide bar.
The position deciding member includes a plurality of position deciding grooves formed at a side of the spherical bearing at an equal interval in a circular direction on the basis of a common center of an outer circumference of the spherical bearing, a flexible plate coupled to the carriage to flexibly hold the spherical bearing with respect to the carriage, and position deciding protrusions formed on the flexible plate to be flexibly inserted into and separated from the position deciding grooves.
Moreover, the flexible plate has a fixation body and a pair of flexible support portions extended from one end of the fixation body and bent toward the side of the spherical bearing to flexibly push the side of the spherical bearing, the pair of flexible support portions having the position deciding protrusions at both ends corresponding to the position deciding grooves.
In addition, it is preferable that a plurality of tool support elements are formed at the side of the spherical bearing, to increase a rotation force of the spherical bearing when a driving tool is inserted into the tool support elements to rotate the spherical bearing.